A Huge Thank-You To The Good Folks Of NORAD

Whose website tracking the progress of Santa across the globe will be occupying all three of my children all day today!

It's actually a very cool website...check it out if you haven't seen it.  Santa and a very solid geography lesson besides...what's not to like?

I Will Not Be Going To The Grocery Store Again Until Dec 26th At The Earliest

I have to say: if there's a more "Bah, humbug" kind of place in the world than the parking lots of major stores this time of year, I can't offhand think of where it might be.  Hell's fricking bells.  Went to pick up a few last things this afternoon and saw a bird flipped, refusal to let pedestrians cross, refusal to let people come out of parking spaces, and two people arguing over a cart, and that was just at the grocery store.  I think all the holiday spirit has been squeezed in miserly gray droplets out of everyone who was shopping today, maybe because of the reality of the looming two-day holiday deadline.  I did what I needed to do and got the hell out of that place as soon as I could.

The Girl was with me, and she wanted to stop for lunch on the way home.  In an attempt to be a good mother, I took her to Wendy's--her choice--and we ate.  She looked up from her burger at one point and commented how nice it was that it was just the two of us out together today!  Talk about a dose of perspective...would love to see the world through her eyes.  She apparently didn't notice the bad moods and craziness and anger all around us and was just happy for some one-on-one time with me, grouchy mother that I am.  

Got home and immediately started to cook, always something that soothes me.  I remember being in high school and my own mother going through the pre-holiday stress--although I didn't really understand it then--and her asking each of us what traditions were important to us so that she could make sure they were kept when the more extraneous sorts of things slid to the wayside.  Baking cookies with her was always the thing I associated most with holidays, so that was my choice.  My grandmother had a real old-fashioned pizzelle iron that none of the rest of us could really operate, but pizzelles are a traditional holiday cookie for us.  I received an electric pizzelle maker as a wedding gift and we use it every Christmas.  Usually Mom makes them, but this year it was my job--I made almond and lemon flavored ones today.  She also makes the traditional pinwheel cookies, but I just don't have the energy to try those this year.  She should be here to do it and she isn't: she's exactly where she needs to be and I support it a thousand percent, but her absence (and Dad's) sucks gigantic MFing rocks.

Anyway, today's cooking efforts yielded the pizzelles, a batch of soft pumpkin spice cookies, an apple strudel made with puff pastry dough (Thing One's request) and a large pot of my mother-in-law's gulaschsuppe, which we will eat with pretzel rolls for dinner.  Somehow the house still smells good with all of those aromas mixed together!  Tomorrow I start the pre-cooking for Tuesday's dinner--all the stuff I can do ahead of time like the orange-cranberry sauce and veggie prep and the baking of Dad's mother's famous chocolate pie--but today was all about the cookie plate.  I am choosing to do the things that make me happy, and having lots of pretty cookies on the plate at Christmas is important to me, dammit.

It is what it is.    

      

Saturday

A quiet day, mostly spent at my in-laws' house eating delicious German food: wienerschnitzel, red cabbage, bratkartoffeln.  A good day for battery recharging.  Only two full days to Christmas and so much to do yet to get ready for the holiday guests: the final push starts tomorrow.  I will clean and wrap and shop for perishable foods and make pizzelles and pecan cookies with my daughter because she loves to help me bake.

And my husband spent a good chunk of the first morning of his Christmas vacation helping me to hang a curtain rod.  It was important to me and not at all important to him but he did it anyway because he loves me, which is more in the spirit of Christmas than so much of this other stuff!

Things That Make Me Laugh

Needed one today.  This helped a lot (many thanks to my husband for finding it!):

(For the purists, here's the original...)

Nobody ever said that my taste in comedy is highbrow.

And of course, a few more T-shirts...

And, of course...

I Like This Santa

So...we got through this week.  It's been a very rough one between unbloggables and the inevitable craziness of the last week of school before Christmas.  The good news is that we are now looking at school in the rear view mirror for a couple of weeks...no more class parties, baking, teacher gifts to coordinate, homework, projects etc for a while.

Two of the three kids had holiday parties today.  Murphy's Law being what it is, they were at precisely the same time at two different schools.  Himself went with Thing Two, and I with The Girl. Her class put on a holiday show, which was followed by a surprise visit from Santa.  At the end of her conversation with him, he told her to make sure that her parents cheered for Notre Dame in the BCS championship!  I am not making this up.  I shook his hand and told him that it would not be an issue.

For Sale: One Slightly Used Dog, Cheap

Baked and decorated about 6 dozen more cookies this afternoon for The Girl and Thing Two's class holiday parties tomorrow.  Left them on the kitchen island for the frosting to harden while we did the usual Thursday post-school rounds of speech therapy, soccer and basketball.

Got home from that craziness, let the dog out of her crate, threw the kids sequentially into the shower, put them to bed and showered quickly myself.  By the time I came back downstairs, she had eaten a full dozen cookies right off the cooling racks and left a few more scattered on the floor.

It's a good thing she's cute!  She'd better not have an upset stomach from this, because I will have zero sympathy...

I'm Back

It's been a tough couple of days, including some serious unbloggables.   Please pardon my absence.

Had a school board meeting last night.  After the craziness and tragedy of Friday, I expected a ton of parents to show up, mostly with questions or suggestions about security.  Was astounded to see a total of five parents and one district teacher in the audience.  And two of the parents were a couple who came together.

This means one of two (maybe three) things:

1) this close to Christmas, everyone forgot that the BOE meeting was last night
2) parents think that we are doing such a good job that they don't need to show up to question or comment
OR
3) they are too apathetic to show up even for something as important as school security right after a major shooting incident.

My money is on #3.  Ridiculous.

Anyway, I was very glad that the couple came, because each brought fantastic perspective to the discussion.  He is a retired SWAT-trained cop; she, an elementary school teacher in a neighboring district.  Both spoke persuasively in favor of putting armed and uniformed policemen in schools.  He spoke of the studies showing the deterrent value of having police onsite and the fact that most shootings stop as soon as the police arrive.  She, identifying with the Connecticut teachers, is afraid of effectively being "trapped in a fishbowl" with nowhere to hide herself or her children in case of intrusion, and told us how difficult it can be under stress to complete the lockdown procedures.

Apparently, as a nation, we are increasingly putting police in schools, and also moving toward having double-doored main entries with a mandatory ID check and in some cases, metal detectors.  This was confirmed by our superintendent, the retired policeman, and also our current Chief of Police.  How sad is it that these precautions are needed for an elementary school??